On hoops and lesser matters

Why freshmen may dominate the draft more than they did the college season

Robert Williams.

The 2017 NBA draft is likely to be the league’s most freshman-dominant selection, well, ever. Since the one-and-done rule was enacted over a decade ago, the record for most freshmen taken as lottery picks is eight.

However this freshman class we currently have before us looks like it’s going to beat that record with ease. Right now on the mock draft boards, one of the few people on earth who’s not currently a college freshman but who stands an excellent chance of being taken in the lottery is Belgium’s own Frank Ntilikina. Another potential gate-crasher here could be Cal sophomore Ivan Rabb.

Other than those guys and their ilk, however, the top of the draft may be thick with freshmen, to wit:

That’s 13 lottery-plausible freshmen without even breaking a sweat. There’s some question as to where Harry Giles will fit into this discussion and maybe there’s room for a Bam Adebayo or a Jarrett Allen, but you get the idea. Purely in NBA draft terms, this freshman class stands a good chance to be historic.

Will it have also been historic in college basketball terms? The definitive answer there will have to wait until April. Put it this way, if Jackson hits the game-winner for Kansas that Monday night in Phoenix over the outstretched hand of Zach Collins or Markkanen or Adebayo, then that will factor into the discussion, sure.

What we can say in February, though, is that the footprint of this stellar group so far has been orthogonal to and not necessarily synonymous with what is most extreme and impressive in the college game as a whole. Jackson, for example, is outstanding, and he may well team with old geezer Frank Mason III to lead his team to a No. 1 seed. (The 13th consecutive league title can already be considered as safely in the bag. Bill Self is good at what he does. Who knew.)

Then again elsewhere on the top line, Villanova’s still doing things the old-fashioned mostly non-freshman way, no Baylor freshman is currently seeing double-digit minutes, and (o, the irony!) Gonzaga’s spectacular freshman is, at 17 minutes per game, far and away the most underrated and under-discussed player on his roster.

Strictly in terms of college footprint, for every Jackson there’s a Robert Williams, and for every season-transorming Lonzo Ball there is, of course, that equally talented point guard marooned 1300 miles north in Seattle. The NBA potential of all of the above is equal or similar. Their college impacts have been all over the map.

If even the historically mighty 2017 freshman class can’t translate manifest talent and pro promise more faithfully into tangible Division I results, it is likely no future freshman class will. Our default mode of talking about freshmen in the preseason is based largely or perhaps even solely on NBA potential. In future preseasons we should take this a step further and talk about these extraordinary talents in the specific context of their likely college impact. Perhaps we’ll find that these two modes of speaking about incoming freshmen are, to borrow a well-turned phrase from my colleague Fran Fraschilla, like Spanish and Portuguese.

A reminder that one-and-dones are rare and can be listed in a relatively small space. It appears that the Big Ten’s remarkable streak of no CBA-era (drafts from 2007 on) freshman first-round picks from any programs not named “Ohio State” or “Indiana” is finally going to end. Miles Bridges will see to that. Well done, sir.